Making Tax Digital: your second quarterly update is due 7 November 2026

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is now live for the first mandatory group of UK sole traders and landlords. If your 2024 to 2025 Self Assessment return showed qualifying income from self-employment and property of more than £50,000, you generally need to use MTD for Income Tax from 6 April 2026 unless an exemption or other exception applies.

That makes autumn 2026 an important point in the first live MTD year. The first quarterly update deadline was 7 August. The second is 7 November 2026. For many businesses this will be the first update where the new digital-record routine starts to feel like part of normal bookkeeping rather than a one-off setup exercise.

What is the second quarterly update?

HMRC describes quarterly updates as summaries of business income and expenses created from your digital records by compatible software. They are not tax returns. Your software totals the income and expense categories recorded for each relevant self-employment or property business and sends those totals to HMRC.

Businesses using calendar update periods follow a slightly different cut-off: the second period runs from 1 April to 30 September, with the same 7 November deadline. HMRC says the choice between standard and calendar periods is made for each source of income in compatible software, and you cannot change the period basis for that tax year after a quarterly update has been sent.

What should you check before 7 November?

The aim is not to turn every quarter into a miniature year-end. HMRC explicitly says you do not need to make accounting or tax adjustments before sending a quarterly update. The practical job is to make sure the underlying digital records are sufficiently complete and accurate for the period.

1. Make sure income received during the period has been captured in your digital records, including income that may have arrived outside your normal invoicing flow.
2. Review business expenses and make sure obvious gaps, duplicates or personal transactions have not distorted the records.
3. Check that each self-employment or property source you are required to report has its own update ready. HMRC requires quarterly updates for each relevant source of income.
4. Reconcile the records you can against bank activity so missing or duplicated transactions are easier to spot before submission.
5. Confirm whether your software is using standard or calendar update periods, particularly if somebody else completed the first update for you.
6. Leave time to resolve software access, HMRC authorisation or agent issues rather than discovering them on 7 November.

Do you need perfectly final numbers?

No. A quarterly update is designed to reflect the digital records you have kept rather than a fully adjusted year-end tax position. The cumulative approach also matters here: because later quarterly updates cover the tax year from the start again, corrections made to your records can flow into a later update without you having to resend every earlier quarter.

After an update is sent, HMRC says you can see an estimate of the tax bill relating to self-employment and property income through compatible software or HMRC online services. Treat that estimate as a planning signal rather than a final tax calculation, because the eventual tax return can include adjustments and other income information.

What happens if you miss 7 November 2026?

The first MTD year has an important transitional rule. HMRC says it will not apply penalty points for late quarterly updates during the 2026 to 2027 tax year. That does not make quarterly updates optional: you still need to keep digital records and send the required quarterly updates before you can submit the tax return.

Who joined MTD in April 2026 — and who joins next?

The rollout is staged. HMRC guidance says people with qualifying income over £50,000 based on the 2024 to 2025 tax year entered the mandatory regime from 6 April 2026. The threshold then falls to more than £30,000 from April 2027, based on 2025 to 2026 qualifying income, and to more than £20,000 from April 2028, based on 2026 to 2027 qualifying income.

HMRC also says that from September 2026 it will start signing up people who should be in MTD for 2026 to 2027 but have not signed themselves up, where its records show qualifying income above £50,000. If you think the rules apply to you, do not rely on the absence of an HMRC message as proof that nothing needs to be done. Check the official eligibility guidance and your own circumstances.

Use the quarterly rhythm to improve the business, not just HMRC compliance

The most useful MTD habit is to avoid treating 7 November as a data-entry deadline. If invoices, expenses and bank activity are recorded continuously, the quarterly update becomes a by-product of better bookkeeping. The same records can help you see overdue invoices, spending changes, cash pressure and an emerging tax liability much earlier.

A simple monthly routine — issue and match invoices, capture expenses, reconcile bank transactions, review uncategorised items and check the tax position — is usually more manageable than trying to repair three months of records at the end of a quarter. The compliance requirement is quarterly; the useful financial picture should be much closer to real time.